RIT software engineering researcher receives Microsoft Azure Award

June 19, 2017

by Fran Broderick

Software development involves collaboration between a variety of stakeholders, and as remote collaboration and cloud computing grow, the management of software development becomes ever more complex. RIT researcher Oliver Wang was recently recognized by Microsoft for his research into Global Software Development (GSD) teams, groups of software developers that work together remotely.

One challenge for GSD teams is assessing, predicting, and improving the quality of the team collaboration in an automated and real-time fashion. Working across cultures and time zones creates a host of complex issues that can make it difficult to guage the efficiency of the software development process. Yang’s team is aiming to change that through a proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a large-scale project that would collect and integrate large amounts of openly accessible GSD data and use the data to develop novel theories and computational tools.

For its part, Microsoft Azure, the cloud computing division of the tech titan, has provided a critical resource for this research by recognizing Yang with a Microsoft Azure Award and the $20,000 worth of cloud computing space that comes with it.

“The Microsoft Azure Award provides a necessary resource for our investigations,” says Yang. “We have developed tools to help GSD teams automatically assess their current collaboration status, and now we’ll be able to migrate these tools to the Azure cloud and make them publicly accessible to other researchers.”